Genesis Page 19

  Holding the desert at bay, staving off the death that ate away at the planet. Christian nodded. He felt confirmed in his idea that the program was unable to give him any outright lie. That didn't mean it would give him forthright responses.

  "This is their greatest engineering?" Laurinda marveled. "We did-better-in my time. Or yours, Christian."

  "They're working on it here, I suppose," the man said. "We'll investigate further. After all, this is a bare glimpse."

  "You must remember," the voice volunteered, "no emulation can be as full and complex as the material universe."

  "M-m, yeh. Skeletal geography, apart from chosen regions; parochial biology; simplified cosmos."

  Laurinda glanced at featureless heaven. "The stars unreachable, because here they are not stars?" She shuddered and pressed close against him.

  "Yes, a paradox," he said. "Let's talk with a scientist."

  "That will be difficult," the voice demurred.

  "You told us in Chinese America you could arrange meetings. It shouldn't be any harder in this place."

  The voice did not reply at once. Unseen machines rumbled. A dust devil whirled up on a sudden gust of wind. Finally: "Very well. It shall be one who will not be stricken dumb by astonishment and fear. Nevertheless, I should supply you beforehand with a brief description of what you will come to."

  "Go ahead. If it is brief."

  What changes in the history would that encounter bring about? Did it matter? This world was evidently not in temporary reactivation, it was ongoing; the newcomers were at the leading edge of its timeline. Gaia could erase their visit from it. If she cared to. Maybe she was going to terminate it soon because it was making no further progress that interested her.

  5

  Transfer.

  Remote in a wasteland, only a road and an airstrip joining it to anything else, a tower lifted from a walled compound. Around it, night was cooling in a silence hardly touched by a susurrus of chant where robed figures bearing dim lights did homage to the stars. Many were visible, keen and crowded amidst their darkness, a rare sight, for clouds had parted across most of the sky. More lights glowed muted on a parapet surrounding the flat roof of a tower. There a single man and his helper used the chance to turn instruments aloft, telescope, spectroscope, cameras, bulks in the gloom.

  Christian and Laurinda appeared unto them.

  The man gasped, recoiled for an instant, and dropped to his knees. His assistant caught a book that he had nearly knocked off a table, replaced it, stepped back, and stood imperturbable, an anthropoid whose distant ancestors had been human but who lived purely to serve his master.

  Christian peered at the man. As eyes adapted, he saw garments like his, embroidered with insignia of rank and kindred, headdress left off after dark. The skin was ebony black but nose and lips were thin, eyes oblique, fingertips tapered, long hair and closely trimmed beard straight and blond. No race that ever inhabited, old Earth, Christian thought; no, this is a breed that Gaia designed for the dying planet.

  The man signed himself, looked into the pale faces of the strangers, and said, uncertainly at first, then with a gathering strength: "Hail and obedience, messengers of God. Joy at your advent."

  Christian and Laurinda understood, as they had understood hunted Zoe. The amulets had told them they would not be the first apparition these people had known. "Rise," Christian said. "Be not afraid."

  "Nor call out," Laurinda added.

  Smart lass, Christian thought. The ceremony down in the courtyard continued. "Name yourself," he directed.

  The man got back on his feet and took an attitude deferential rather than servile. "Surely the mighty ones know," he said. "I am Eighth Khaltan, chief astrologue of the Ilgai Technome, and, and wholly unworthy of this honor." He hesitated. "Is that, dare I ask, is that why you have chosen the forms you show me?"

  "No one has had a vision for several generations," explained the soundless voice in the heads of the newcomers.

  "Gaia has manifested herself in the past?" Christian subvocalized.

  "Yes, to indicate desirable courses of action. Normally the sending has had the shape of a fire."

  "How scientific is that?"

  Laurinda addressed Khaltan: "We are not divine messengers. We have come from a world beyond your world, as mortal as you, not to teach but to learn."

  The man smote his hands together. "Yet it is a miracle, again a miracle-in my lifetime!"

  Nonetheless he was soon avidly talking. Christian recalled myths of men who were the lovers of goddesses or who tramped the roads and sat at humble meat with God Incarnate. The believer accepts as the unbeliever cannot.

  Those were strange hours that followed. Khaltan was not simply devout. To him the supernatural was another set of facts, another facet of reality. Since it lay beyond his ken, he had turned his attention to the measurable world. In it he observed and theorized like a Newton. Tonight his imagination blazed, questions exploded from him, but always he chose his words with care and turned everything he heard around and around in his mind, examining it as he would have examined some jewel fallen from the sky.

  Slowly, piecemeal, while the stars wheeled around the pole, a picture of his civilization took shape. It had overrun and absorbed every other society-no huge accomplishment, when Earth was meagerly populated and most folk on the edge of starvation.

  The major technology was biological, agronomy, aquaculture in the remnant lakes and seas, ruthlessly practical genetics. Industrial chemistry flourished. It joined with physics at the level of the later nineteenth century to enable substantial engineering works and reclamation projects.

  Society itself-How do you summarize an entire culture in words? It can't be done. Christian got the impression of a nominal empire, actually a broad-based oligarchy of families descended from conquering soldiers. Much upward mobility was by adoption of promising commoners, whether children or adults. Sons who made no contribution to the well-being of the clan or who disgraced it could be kicked out, if somebody did not pick a fight and kill them , in a duel. Unsatisfactory daughters were also expelled, unless a marriage into a lower class could be negotiated. Otherwise the status of the sexes was roughly equal; but this meant that women who chose to compete with men must do so on male terms. The nobles provided the commons with protection, courts of appeal, schools, leadership, and pageantry. In return they drew taxes, corvee, and general subordination; but in most respects the commoners were generally left to themselves. Theirs was not altogether a dog-eat-dog situation; they had institutions, rites, and hopes of their own. Yet many went to the wall, while the hard work of the rest drove the global economy.

  It's not a deliberately cruel civilization, Christian thought, but neither is it an especially compassionate one.

  Had any civilization ever been, really? Some fed their poor, but mainly they fed their politicians and bureaucrats. |.

  He snatched his information out of talk that staggered everywhere else. The discourse for which Khaltan yearned was of the strangers' home-he got clumsily evasive, delaying responses-and the whole system of the universe, astronomy, physics, everything.

  "We dream of rockets going to the planets. We have tried to shoot them to the moon," he said, and told of launchers that ought to have worked. "All failed."

  Of course, Christian thought. Here the moon and planets, yes, the very sun were no more than lights. The tides rose and fell by decree. The Earth was a caricature of Earth outside. Gaia could do no better.

  "Are we then at the end of science?" Khaltan cried once. "We have sought and sought for decades, and have won to nothing further than measurements more exact." Nothing that would lead to relativity, quantum theory, wave mechanics, their revolutionary insights and consequences. Gaia could not accommodate it. "The angels in the past showed us what to look for. Will you not? Nature holds more than we know. Your presence bears witness!"

  "Later, perhaps later," Christian mumbled, and cursed himself for his falsity.

 
"Could we reach the planets-Caged, the warrior spirit turns inward on itself. Rebellion and massacre in the Westlands-"

  Laurinda asked what songs the people sang.

  Clouds closed up. The rite in the courtyard ended. Khaltan's slave stood motionless while he himself talked on and on.

  The eastern horizon lightened. "We must go," Christian said.

  "You will return?" Khaltan begged. "Ai-ha, you will?"

  Laurinda embraced him for a moment. "Fare you well," she stammered, "fare always well."

  How long would his "always" be?

  6

  After an uneasy night's sleep and a nearly wordless breakfast, there was no real cause to leave the house in England. The servants, scandalized behind carefully held faces, might perhaps eavesdrop, but would not comprehend, nor would any gossip that they spread make a difference. A deeper, unuttered need sent Christian and Laurinda forth. This could well be the last of their mornings.

  They followed a lane to a hill about a kilometer away. Trees on its top did not obscure a wide view across the land. The sun stood dazzling in the east, a few small clouds sailed across a blue as radiant as their whiteness, but an early breath of autumn was in the wind. It went strong and fresh, scattering dawn-mists off plowland and sending waves through the green of pastures; it soughed in the branches overhead and whirled some already dying leaves off. High beyond them winged a V of wild geese.

  For a while man and woman stayed mute. Finally Laurinda breathed, savored, fragrances of soil and sky, and murmured, "That Gaia brought this back to life-She must be good. She loves the world."

  Christian looked from her, aloft, and scowled before he made oblique reply. "What are she and Wayfarer doing?"

  "How can we tell?"-tell what the gods did or even where they fared. They were not three-dimensional beings, nor bound by the time that bound their creations.

  "She's keeping him occupied," said Christian.

  "Yes, of course. Taking him through the data, the whole of her stewardship of Earth."

  "To convince him she's right in wanting to let the planet die."

  "A tragedy-but in the end, everything is tragic, isn't it?" Including you and me. "What . . . we . . . they . . . can learn from the final evolution, that may well be worth it all, as the Acropolis was worth it all. The galactic brain itself can't foreknow what life will do, and life is rare among the stars."

  Almost, he snapped at her. "I know, I know. How often have we been over this ground? How often have they? I might have believed it myself. But-"

  Laurinda waited. The wind skirled, caught a stray lock of hair, tossed it about over her brow.

  "But why has she put humans, not into the distant past"-Christian gestured at the landscape lying like an eighteenth-century painting around them-"but into now, an Earth where flesh-and-blood humans died eons ago?"

  "She's in search of a fuller understanding, surely."

  "Surely?"

  Laurinda captured his gaze and held it. "I think she's been trying to find how humans can have, in her, the truly happy lives they never knew in the outer cosmos."

  "Why should she care about that?"

  "I don't know. I'm only human." Earnestly: "But could it be that that element in her is so strong-so many, many of us went into her-that she longs to see us happy, like a mother with her children?"

  "All that manipulation, all those existences failed and discontinued. It doesn't seem very motherly to me."

  "I don't know, I tell you!" she cried.

  He yearned to comfort her, kiss away the tears caught in her lashes, but urgency drove him onward. "If the effort has no purpose except itself, it seems mad. Can a nodal mind go insane?"

  She retreated from him, appalled. "No. Impossible."

  "Are you certain? At least, the galactic brain has to know the truth, the whole truth, to judge whether something here has gone terribly wrong."

  Laurinda forced a nod. "You will report to Wayfarer, and he will report to Alpha, and all the minds will decide" a question that was unanswerable by mortal creatures.

  Christian stiffened. "I have to do it at once."

  He had hinted, she had guessed, but just the same she seized both his sleeves and protest spilled wildly from her lips. "What? Why? No! You'd only disturb him in his rapport, and her. Wait till we're summoned. We have till then, darling."

  "I want to wait," he said. Sweat stood on his skin, though the blood had withdrawn. "God, I want to! But I don't dare."

  "Why not?"

  She let go of him. He stared past her and said fast, flattening the anguish out of his tones: "Look, she didn't want us to see that final world. She clearly didn't, or quite expected we'd insist, or she'd have been better prepared. Maybe she could have passed something else off on us. As is, once he learns, Wayfarer will probably demand to see for himself. And she does not want him particularly interested in her emulations. Else why hasn't she taken him through them directly, with me along to help interpret?

  "Oh, I don't suppose our action has been catastrophic for her plans, whatever they are. She can still cope, can still persuade him these creations are merely . . . toys of hers, maybe. That is, she can if she gets the chance to. I don't believe she should."

  "How can you take on yourself-How can you imagine-"

  "The amulets are a link to her. Not a constantly open channel, obviously, but at intervals they must inform a fraction of her about us, and she must also be able to set up intervals when Wayfarer gets too preoccupied with what he's being shown to notice that a larger part of her attention has gone elsewhere. We don't know when that'll happen next. I'm going back to the house and tell her through one of the amulets that I require immediate contact with him."

  Laurinda stared as if at a ghost.

  "That will not be necessary," said the wind.

  Christian lurched where he stood. "What?" he blurted. "You-"

  "Oh-Mother-" Laurinda lifted her hands into emptiness.

  The blowing of the wind, the rustling in the leaves made words. "The larger part of me, as you call it, has in fact been informed and is momentarily free. I was waiting for you to choose your course."

  Laurinda half moved to kneel in the grass. She glanced at Christian, who had regained balance and stood with fists at sides, confronting the sky. She went to stand by him.

  "My lady Gaia," Christian said most quietly, "you can do to us as you please," change or obliterate or whatever she liked, in a single instant; but presently Wayfarer would ask why. "I think you understand my doubts."

  "I do," sighed the air. "They are groundless. My creation of the Technome world is no different from my creation of any other. My avatar said it for me: I give existence, and I search for ways that humans, of their free will, can make the existence good."

  Christian shook his head. "No, my lady. With your intellect and your background, you must have known from the first what a dead end that world would soon be, scientists on a planet that is a sketch and everything else a shadow show. My limited brain realized it. No, my lady, as cold-bloodedly as you were experimenting, I believe you did all the rest in the same spirit. Why? To what end?"

  "Your brain is indeed limited. At the proper time, Wayfarer shall receive your observations and your fantasies. Meanwhile, continue in your duty, which is to observe further and refrain from disturbing us in our own task."

  "My duty is to report."

  "In due course, I say." The wind-voice softened. "There are pleasant places besides this."

  Paradises, maybe. Christian and Laurinda exchanged a glance that lingered for a second. Then she smiled the least bit, boundlessly sorrowfully, and shook her head.

  "No," he declared, "I dare not."

  He did not speak it, but he and she knew that Gaia knew what they foresaw. Given time, and they lost in their joy together, she could alter their memories too slowly and subtly for Wayfarer to sense what was happening.

  Perhaps she could do it to Laurinda at this moment, in a flash. But she did not know Chris
tian well enough. Down under his consciousness, pervading his being, was his aspect of Wayfarer and of her coequal Alpha. She would need to feel her way into him, explore and test with infinite delicacy, remake him detail by minutest detail, always ready to back off if it had an unexpected effect; and perhaps another part of her could secretly take control of the Technome world and erase the event itself. . . . She needed time, even she.

  "Your action would be futile, you know," she said. "It would merely give me the trouble of explaining to him what you in your arrogance refuse to see."

  "Probably. But I have to try."

  The wind went bleak. "Do you defy me?"

  "I do," Christian said. It wrenched from him: "Not my wish. It's Wayfarer in me. I, I cannot do otherwise. Call him to me."

  The wind gentled. It went over Laurinda like a caress. "Child of mine, can you not persuade this fool?"

  "No, Mother," the woman whispered. "He is what he is."

  "And so-?"

  Laurinda laid her hand in the man's. "And so I will go with him, forsaking you, Mother."

  "You are casting yourselves from existence." Christian's free fingers clawed the air. "No, not her!" he shouted.

  "She's innocent!"

  "I am not," Laurinda said. She swung about to lay her arms around him and lift her face to his. "I love you."

  "Be it as you have chosen," said the wind.

  The dream that was the world fell into wreck and dissolved. Oneness swept over them like twin tides, each reclaiming a flung drop of spindrift; and the two seas rolled again apart.

  XI

  The last few hundred man-lengths Kalava went mostly on his belly. From bush to bole he crawled, stopped, lay flat and strained every sense into the shadows around him, before he crept onward. Nothing stirred but the twigs above, buffeted on a chill and fitful breeze. Nothing sounded but their creak and click, the scrittling of such leaves as they bore, now and then the harsh cry of a hookbeak- those, and the endless low noise of demons, like a remote surf wherein shrilled flutes on no scale he knew, heard more through his skin than his ears but now, as he neared, into the blood and bone of him.